Our first race of the day was a big one. When we saw the FaT crew row by the boathouse with skull facepaint, there was no doubt that they were ready to battle. However, we drew courage from Alistair’s wise words that ‘effort put into costumes is inversely correlated to race performance’. When silence fell at the starting line, the focus returned to the boat. We had a good start, and immediately had half a boat length over FaT. In the first half, we build out a steady lead of one and a half boat lengths. Despite a slowdown in the second half, we managed to hold on the lead and won a decisive victory.

Race 2: Clare NM1 v Caius NM1

We could not rest on our laurels after the first victory against FaT, as our next opponent posed a formidable challenge. Having seen the Caius crew in action at Queens’ Ergs, we knew that they had a lot of power in the boat. Strengthened by the boat wisdom that ‘ergs don’t float’, we knew that our superior technique could win us the race. Sadly, our superior technique was absent during this race. The first half of the race was sloppy, and the timing and the balance of the boat slowly deteriorated. When we caught a crab, and our boat ran into the bank, a few brief moments of chaos ensued. We quickly recovered, but at this point the Caius lead was too big to bridge.

Our first race! It’s funny to look back at this race, because I think we’ve come along so much since we took part. It was 500 metres, so was maximum intensity, and I don’t think we’d ever trained at that kind of pace before. Still, we really gave it a go and rowed better than we might’ve expected. We rowed twice, and our first race was very close. We were a couple of seconds late off the mark because we didn’t actually know how they were going to signal the start of the race. I’m not sure what we were expecting but “attention Clare – GO!” caught us all a bit off guard. By the second we were too exhausted to really compete. Overall, there were some major crabs caught, and those along with the outfits we were wearing made it quite funny; our theme was ‘demonstrate’, so we were rowing dressed as hippies protesting. We didn’t win but I think the experience overall was when we really came together as a team and started training harder for our future races.